"Speaker 1: My name is Daniel Cortes.
I'm a research professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, at the University
of Delaware.
So, I do is to develop imaging techniques, to diagnose an alleviate injuries in atopic
tissues.
I work in, in two main projects, one is on the achilles tendon, and we are trying to
evaluate a or to prove the treatment outcomes for tendon injuries, like ruptures and tendinopathy.
The other project I work is in the inter-bacterial disc, and which is sometimes related to back
pain, and what we want to do is to develop imaging techniques to do early diagnosis of
this degeneration.
Pushing push push ..
Speaker 2: Yes
Speaker 1: I'm originally from Colombia, Calic Colombia.
I was there until I was 26, then I moved here for to do the PhD..
Its difficult, its always difficult because I don't have family here with me.
So I always miss my family and friends, like them.
My family is excited about, about this, sometimes they don't understand the technical details,
but they like that its going to help people someday.
So when I was in Columbia, I really wanted to do research, and so I thought that having
a Ph.D was the, the best way to go.
In the US, the technology that's available is very, very impressive and is very good
for the area that I work on.
So that's my main, my main motivation to be here.
But, I have the opportunity to go, couple of times a year, to visit my family and friends,
so its not that bad.
So when I was in undergrad, I started working in bio mechanics, I started working in say
computational simulation of the mechanical behavior or tissues.
And I really loved it, and then I decided that research was gonna be my career.
So the objective is to measure a mechanical properties of tissues, and to do that we apply
mechanical vibration using a electromagnetic actuator.
And to measure the vibration inside a tissue, we use ultrasound.
Sometimes we use a MRI, but in this particular case we use ultrasound.
And, the idea is to measure the wave of speed, the velocity at which the wave propagates
through the tissue.
And, based on that information we can calculate a mechanical properties of the tissue that
we are interested on.
push in push in
Speaker 2 : Its so hard.
Speaker 1: I really like a styling these tissues because we learn a lot about the function
of the tissues, and all these things can be used later on to assign treatments or to evaluate
treatment for these tissues.
I don't know much, but like when I'm at home, I like cooking, I like baking.
I sometimes I invite my friends to come over, and specially for Thanksgiving, that's my
favorite American holiday.
Speaker 2: So we are working out here
Speaker 1: What I want with my research is to improve a treatments for patients.
So we want to analyze what is their response of these tissues to the different treatments
and see how these treatments can be optimized to get the best outcome possible.
My motivation is to get to a point where all this work is gonna benefit, benefit someone
that has this, one of these injuries."